In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Paige Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>There are so many different factors that go into the amount of medals
>won that it seems silly to perform a regression based upon population
>and GDP to use as predictors. Organization of Olympic Committees,
>training facility quality, programs for youths, weather, etc. all can
>affect the number of medals won, and then there is the factor of
>injuries, which to me seems like it cannot be modelled except as
>random noise.
I presume that the people making such models are interested in whether
or not the poor or good performance of a country might be due to
controllable factors such as organization, training facilities, etc.
In other words, they want to know if they could be doing better, given
the resources available. So it makes perfect sense to include
population and GDP as explanatory variables, but NOT type of
organization of the Olympic Committee, or type of training facility
used. However, the climate should indeed be included as an
explanatory variable, if it is thought that it might be important.
There will of course be random noise, though I'd think that many
injury problems might be attributable to the training regime used, or
to sending athletes to the games who shouldn't have been selected to
go because of their injuries.
Radford Neal
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